Biospecimens, such as blood or urine, are routinely obtained from patients and brought to laboratory facilities for testing and analysis. In general, a patient's biospecimen is placed in a container, such as a test tube or vial, which is then sealed and delivered to the testing laboratory.
Typically, a lab technician at the testing laboratory will manually load these containers, which can vary in their outside dimensions, into specimen container racks, each rack typically holding several containers which can be transported between various locations in the laboratory, as a group, via a conveyor. Individual biospecimens are identified within the group and generally within the laboratory by a bar code or other machine readable indicia affixed to the container. Usually, these indicia are attached to the container prior to or when the specimen is obtained from a patient, however they may be applied when containers are received by the technician in the laboratory. A laboratory information system, or other suitable specimen management means, is employed to also relate the indicia with the test or tests to be performed on the biospecimen.
Once the racks are loaded, they are placed on a conveyor and transported to various stations within the laboratory, such as biospecimen test equipment sites, etc.
The above described prior art biospecimen transport systems have several disadvantages. First, to accommodate containers of different sizes, the container racks are designed with container receptacles which are sized to receive the largest contemplated container. Containers of less than the largest size can therefore move within their respective container receptacles in the rack and this can result in the bar codes or other identifying indicia on the containers being obscured from a scanner reader by portions of the rack. This can require that the containers being removed from the rack each time access is required to the indicia.
Another disadvantage is that several containers of biospecimens are transported along the conveyor as a group in the same rack. This grouped transport of biospecimens can decrease the efficiency of the transport system because transport of all of the biospecimens in a rack is delayed while any single container from the rack is tested, or otherwise accessed, at any location on the transport system. This delay is exacerbated if a particular container contains a biospecimen that must undergo a test that requires a relatively long period of time to complete.
Attempts have been made to improve transport efficiency and/or reduce transport delays by having the lab technician sort the biospecimens and load biospecimens to be tested with similar tests into the same rack. However, this requires a substantial time commitment on the part of the technician to perform the sorting, increasing the expense of operating the laboratory.